


Joanne

by DaintilyMoreoverWhims



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22500526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaintilyMoreoverWhims/pseuds/DaintilyMoreoverWhims
Summary: Complete nonsense.Rated T for a very small amount of swearing.





	Joanne

You called me last night, and you told me about your work. You said that Peter in accounting was making moves on Jenny in human resources, but that you didn't like the way he approached it. You complained about your boss, whose name you've never told me, and you said that he should have died in that car crash four months ago. I don't think you meant that. You told me that you were thinking about taping an airhorn to his chair, just to see if it would trigger his PTSD. I think if I didn't know you, and I heard you saying things like this in a café to a close friend of yours, I would call you a cunt in my head. I think I would also delegate some lesser insult to the person you were talking to, even if they were on the inside also calling you a cunt. All this I would do in less than a second as you turned to face the barista, scowling slightly at the color of his skin. Now I am thinking about this, it makes me dislike you more. This fiction is mine, but it is a corrosive fluid, and next Wednesday when we meet at John's and I greet you with less enthusiasm than usual, you will be unaware of the role you haven't played in a story that hasn't happened, to make me hate you all the more.

You told me that you felt tired, and that you hadn't been getting enough sleep. You said good night, which I mirrored automatically, and hung up. Dreadfully unfortunate, I often tell myself, that the previous occupant of my flat had punched a hole at head-height on the wall above the telephone socket. Had they sat down and thought about kittens, I would not be staring at this painting, wishing I were staring at the hole. Then you called again. You said you wanted just to talk. And there you were, standing in your valley crying "sleep, sleep!", as the fields rush silently under you like a treadmill of Earth and whispers. Lying, on top of your already tarnished existence?

Maybe I will buy an airhorn. I could tape it under your bed, ignoring of course the logistics of my entry to your bedroom. It would scare you once, but airhorns are awfully cumbersome to conceal. This is why I would plan ahead, buy in bulk, think in bulk, break in at random intervals to set up new horns in new locations. You live alone, so certainly this would be frightening. If I kept it up, you might well become paranoid. PTSD. You're walking to the supermarket, and I am there. I play the sound of an airhorn softly from the isle over, watching you through cans of lentil soup. Now you think you're going mad. Hearing things, Joanne? Solitude can do that to you. Maybe you should get a therapist, though it will make no difference. I have bribed them, or else they are me, and the games will continue. Then I will cut the brake lines in your car, having timed my antics that it is now mid-winter. Drive slowly, Joanne, there's a lorry coming. A man with a white beard and glasses is driving it, and he of course cannot tell what is sloshing like unthickened custard in your brain. You turn, you slide, you break, you don't. The lorry driver hits the horn. In your head you see the unfaced face of your Airhorn Villain, and you panic. You are your boss, your trauma reversed.

I am not going to do this. For one, if I cannot work up the willpower to plaster over a hole in my wall, do you think I have the motivation? This is a false correlation, in honesty. I can dedicate myself to tasks so long as they please me. Regardless, I have seen you in hospital once before, and the image is not one I wish to review. A creature of tubes and screens and beeping. The line moves on the screen, and it is you.

It is not you. It is me. You are on the inside, looking out, the line overlayed on my face as I pace the room. You push air into my lungs with each of your breaths, but stubbornly I breathe my own rhythm. After all, the dials face me. I can turn the knobs. But I mustn't. If I rely on the knobs to alter my self I will lose ability to do so organically. Then I will be worse than you were, when you slept in that fetid bed for a month. A lifeless caddy for the sum of my experiences, limping hunched to the rhythm of the beeps, adjusting the tint of my perceptions with the box in my hands. I may already be this way. If I thought, in my unthinking then, that I would be better with no knowledge of this interface, I would not notice it. It would be invisible, yet still functional. Not knowing of it consciously, its interactions and effects would run as a background task of my mentality. To appear normal, the interface is absorbed. Now think, how am I different from how I was before? I see the world, I tell myself stories, my personality adjusts. The dials face me, but I am two, one in front of the other, the box in between, beeping.

The line moves on the screen.  
And it is you.


End file.
